Whittier City Hall, Brookfield Homes and preservationist-minded Whittier citizens are engaged in a classic Southern California development battle over the future of the historic Nelles site, and all the parties need to start listening to each other.

Which is not what they are doing right now, as the Whittier City Council plans its public hearings on the project, beginning next Monday, June 22.

The Whittier Conservancy has filed a lawsuit against the state of California seeking to delay the sale of the state-owned former juvenile correction facility, a 74-acre gem that is among the most attractive developable open space in Los Angeles County.

Development is not a bad word. Our region desperately needs new housing, both of the market-rate kind and the affordable kind. In a rapidly shifting retail and commercial environment, shaped by Internet shopping and the mobile office, we still need places to buy stuff and business-oriented neighborhoods with flexible uses.

In theory, the elected local politicians and their appointed planning commissioners, along with City Hall staff, can coordinate the naturally disparate ways that the public and a huge corporation such as Canadian-based Brookield — it bought $224 million worth of real estate last year, and controls 106,000 lots, according to its 2014 annual report — interact as everyone tries to have their say on the way the development will look and work.

But preservationists are concerned that half of the key historic buildings — all very adaptable for current-day re-use and of a quality and aesthetic almost impossible to recreate today — would be razed by the developer under its current plans. Locals who reply that this is sentimental nonsense that goes against America’s free-market grain either don’t realize what’s at stake here or misunderstand the way the public process works. Zoning and community-generated specific plans such as those that govern development at Nelles are created for a reason: So that our cities don’t look and work like impossible Houston, where one can essentially build a skyscraper next to a cottage.

In an eloquent takedown printed in The Preservationist, its quarterly newsletter, the Whittier Conservancy lists 10 Nelles myths, and plays myth buster: “Myth 4: ‘The developer should be able to do what they want with their property.’ It’s not their property. Nelles was built by the public and has served the public interest for over a century. It belongs to the public today. The issue here (is)the conditions under which our property is turned over to a private entity. We have the right to demand that it meet our needs, not simply be used to fill corporate coffers.”

The Brookfield plan for housing and commercial could be worse. It could also be much, much better. There is too little open space, it’s too car-centric in a new transit era, its tax-dollar projections are unrealistic, it ignores now-established smart-growth concepts in place of more beige sprawl.

Whittier City Council, why not push for the Conservancy’s vision of “a sustainable, pedestrian-friendly, inter-generational, transit-oriented community with a strong sense of place” instead of just rubber-stamping bad planning? You’ve got the power to create a great place instead of a mediocre one.